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All Rise...

The best Christmas surprise Judge Daryl Loomis ever got was the gift of silence.

The Charge

The bloodiest Christmas story ever told.

The Case

Aside from the obvious Halloween setting, Christmas seems like the perfect
holiday for horror. Loving families celebrating the season and all the religious
implications are ripe for subversion through terror and gore, and yet there are
very few decent examples of holiday horror. Now we have another example in
Bloody Christmas. It's not the worst one I've ever seen, but like most of
them, it's pretty poor.

During the holiday season, a small town is under siege by a child murderer.
With the police on the trail to find the fiend, two stories begin to converge.
First, a local television Santa (Steve Montague, Ultrachrist!) begins
having fantasies about killing his employers and loses his job, causing his life
to become a shambles. Second, a priest (Robert Youngren, I Spill Your
Guts) is trying to organize his Christmas charity work, but all his usual
helpers have abandoned him for mysterious reasons, causing him to start plotting
their deaths. As the two come together, it will be the most violent holiday
season ever.

I should have known better. When the box stated that Bloody Christmas
was from the producers of Bad Biology, I
thought that it might be similarly ridiculous and deliver some good, campy fun.
Well, it's ridiculous, that's for sure. Otherwise, it's pretty awful all the way
around. But producers aren't the names one should bank on to make a good movie
and, sure enough, my intuition was dead wrong.

It's an amateur production and deserves a little leeway as a result, but
there really isn't much to redeem it on any level. From the quality of
performances and the information revealed in the interviews on the disc, most of
the actors are friends of first-time writer/director Michael Shershenovich and
it really shows, both in quality and in character. I'm not one to judge how
churchgoers are supposed to look, but I have a hard time believing that a
priest's congregation is made up exclusively of tattooed, pierced punks.

The real trouble, though, is in the story, which makes no sense at all.
There's some violence and sacrilege thrown around here and there, but not nearly
enough to make up for the useless plot. It runs around in circles, intercutting
the two stories seemingly at random, finally connecting them at the very end
with no warning or sense. It wouldn't bother me so much if there had been more
actual horror in the movie before the final twenty minutes, but there's
virtually none and it left me feeling like I'd just wasted a whole lot of
time.

Bloody Christmas arrives on DVD from MVD Visual in a subpar,
technically deficient edition. The 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer fares poorly, with
murky colors, uneven black levels, and a ton of compression issues. Even with a
pristine transfer, the film wouldn't have looked good, but in this state, it's
hardly worth watching. The stereo sound mix is only slightly better. It's
consistently soft with dialog that is often difficult to understand and the
music is barely audible. For extras, we have a few deleted scenes, some brief
interviews, and a trailer.

Bloody Christmas will find nothing but a lump of coal in its stocking
this year. There's a tiny bit of entertainment value, I suppose, but it's poorly
filmed and very confusing. I can't recommend it on any level.